There was not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, forest. Only the sky alone is there; the face of the earth is not clear. Only the sea alone is pooled under all the sky; there is nothing whatever gathered together. It is at rest; not a single thing stirs. It is held back; kept at rest under the sky.

Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: only the pooled water, only the calm sea, only it is pooled.

Whatever might be is simply not there: only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night. Only the Maker, Modeler alone, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering light....

So there were three of them, as Heart of Sky, who came to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, when the dawn of life was conceived:

"How should it be sown, how should it dawn? Who is to be the provider, nurturer?"

"Let it be this way, think about it: this water should be removed, emptied out for the formation of the earth's own plate and platform, then comes the sowing, the dawning of the sky-earth. But there will be no high days and no bright praise for our work, our design, until the rise of the human work, the human design," they said.

And then the earth rose because of them; it was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth, they said "Earth." It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding. Then the mountains were separated from the water, all at once the great mountains came forth. By their genius alone, by their cutting edge alone they carried out the conception of the mountain-plain,¹ whose face grew instant groves of cypress and pine. (D. Tedlock 1985:72-73)

So begins the story of Creation in the Popol Vuh, the great genesis myth of the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala. Every culture has its own story of genesis, and by looking at these stories we can learn a great deal about the peoples who make them. We in the West tell Creation stories that show our reverence for science: the Big Bang, the General Relativity Theory, the Theory of Chaos. We have created these cosmic models of reality to explain how things got to be the way they are, and how the basic stuff of the universe works, where we came from, and where we are going. We use science and its tools to try to understand our world, our nature as living beings, and to optimize the chances that the future will work in the way we anticipate will be best for us collectively and individually. The Maya myth of Creation is no different-whether told in its sixteenth-century highland K'iche' form or in the version inscribed on sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-century stone monuments in the ruins of the lowland royal capitals. The myth of Creation, the symbols that expressed it, and the rituals that celebrated it were the tools the Maya used to investigate the same questions.

We have been studying these ancient Maya records of Creation for many years and thought we understood what they had said about the events that began the world. Oh, how wrong we were! In November 1991, a series of events began that pulled back the veil that had hidden a truly stunning and magnificent understanding of the cosmos. For the Maya, Creation was at the heart of everything they represented in their art and architecture. When we took a second look at their temples, ballcourts, statuary, murals, and ceramic art in the light of our new understanding, we were overwhelmed by how these objects mirrored the Maya's unique vision of reality. Letting this remarkable record of their minds and hearts speak to us has been one of the most exhilarating experiences of our lives.

These new insights into Maya Creation mythology came at the eleventh hour in the writing of this book; nevertheless, they grew out of the patterns we had found and the interpretations we had evolved during the earlier studies we had made. We knew, for example, that important Creation texts are found at several Maya sites. We had written about the most important of these texts. We had associated them with images found on vases and sacrificial plates, and had synthesized an account of the Classic-period Creation story to serve as the basis of our chapter on dedication ritual (now our Chapter 5). These data had given us the principal actors of Creation, the dates of the events, and their mythological contexts. For example, the K'iche' Popol Vuh told us that the world had been created, destroyed, and re-created at least three times before the present Creation, the one in which we now live. ³ In both the K'iche' and Classic-period version of the story, important protagonists were male and female Creators born just before the current Creation. They were the instigators of the world in which we are now living. In the Popol Vuh they are called Xpiyakok and Xmukane. They are also:

                       Maker, Modeler, named Bearer, Begetter,
                       Hunahpu Possum, Hunahpu Coyote,
                       Great White Peccary  7 Tapir,'
                       Sovereign Plumed Serpent,
                       Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea,
                       Maker of the Blue-Green Plate,
                       Maker of the Blue-Green Bowl,

                       as they are called, also named,  also described as

                       the midwife, matchmaker,
                       named Xpiyakok, Xmukane,
                       defender, protector,
                       twice a midwife, twice a matchmaker.

                                                   (D. Tedlock   1985.71)

We also realized that the ancients regarded the day of this Creation, the world of human beings, as an extraordinary point in the cycles of time. In three magnificent texts at the site of Koba, scribes recorded it as one of the largest finite numbers we humans have ever written. Accord- ing to these inscriptions, our world was created on the day 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk'u. On this day all the cycles of the Maya calendar above twenty years were set at thirteen (Fig. 2: l)-that is to say, the cycles of 400 years, 8,000 years, 160,000 years, 32,000,000 years, and so on, all the way up to a cycle number extending to twenty places (20₂₁ x I 360-day year). In our calendar, this day fell on August 13, B.C. 3114 (or September 20, -3113 in the Julian calendar). To understand what this means, we need a little scale. The thirteens in this huge number act like twelve in our clocks-the next hour after twelve is one. Thirteen changed to one as each of these cycles in the Maya calendar was completed; therefore, we have the following sequence:

            13. 13. 13. 0. 0.  0.  1   5  Imix      9  Kumk'u       (Aug. 14, 3114 B.C.)
            13. 13. 13. 0. 0.  1.  0   It Ahaw      3  Pop          (Sept. 2, 3114 B.C.)
            13. 13. 13. 0. 1.  0.  0   13 A-haw     3  Kumk'u       (Aug. 7, 3113 B.C.)
            13. 13. 13. 1. 0.  0.  0   2  Ahaw      8  Mak          (May 1, 3094 B.C.)
            13. 13.  1. 0. 0.  0.  0   3  Ahaw      13 Ch'en        (Nov. 15, 2720 B.C.)
            13. 13. 13. 0. 0.  0.  0   4  Ahaw      3  K'ank'in     (Dec. 23, A.D. 2012)
            13.  1.  0. 0. 0.  0.  0   10 Ahaw      13 Yaxk'in      (Oct. 15, A.D. 4772)
            1.   0.  0. 0. 0.  0.  0   7  Ahaw      3  Zotz'        (Nov. 22, A.D. 154587)

We have no Classic-period book equivalent to the Popol Vuh, which was written by the K'iche' people after the Spanish Conquest. But we do have the Creation story as Maya kings inscribed it into their royal monuments. At Quirigua, a small but important town on the Motagua river in Guatemala, a powerful lord named Kawak-Sky raised a series of enormous stelae, stone trees to display himself arrayed in the imagery of the cosmos. On one of these, prosaically dubbed Stela C, Kawak-Sky's scribes wrote precisely what the Classic-period Maya believed happened in the first moments of the current era.

We're going to take you step by step through these opening words of creation on Stela C to share with you what we knew when our adventure with Creation began. People sometimes get the impression that decipherment is the work of one extraordinary individual who comes along and decodes the entire story. Nothing could be further from the truth. The translation of even a single text almost always involves the combined efforts and insights of many different scholars working together or building on each other's work. The same is true here.

The text on Stela C (Fig. 2:2) starts with a shorthand notation of the day-short compared to the immense date recorded at Koba, that is. Kawak-Sky's scribes recorded the birthday of the contemporary cosmos as 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk'u. The phrase that follows this date is found in almost all Classic-period Creation texts. Our friend Barbara MacLeod⁷ deciphered the first part of this phrase as hal which means "to say" and "to make appear." As the opening quote from the Popol Vuh explains, Creation began with the utterance of a word and the appearance of the thing embodied by the word. The ancient Maya apparently thought of the process in the same way.

We learned how to read the second glyph of the Quirigua Creation story through a remarkably serendipitous accident. In February 1992 Linda opened a package containing a book from Austria. It wasn't until later that she realized the parcel had been addressed to her German friend, Nikolai Grube. By then it was too late. Inside the package was Karl Herbert Mayer's⁸ new volume of unprovenienced Maya monuments. The book arrived in the middle of a hard day of writing. At first Linda decided to put it aside, but then she began thinking about the odd quirk of fate that had placed this book in her hands. Maybe it had arrived for a reason. She opened it and began to look through the inscriptions it contained. Sure enough, one of the monuments in the book had a Creation text that she had never seen before. That text held the phonetic key that allowed her to decipher the second glyph in the Quirigua Creation story as k'oh "image or mask."⁹

Furthermore, the full reading of the inscription on the stela in Mayer's book (Fig. 2:3) was ilahi yax k'oh ak chak k'u ahaw, "was seen, the first turtle image, great god lord." This turtle is a very special one (Fig. 2:4) associated with the Maize God, First Father. In the Popol Vuh, First Father was killed in Xibalba, the Maya Otherworld, by the Lords of Death. They then buried his body in a ballcourt. His twin sons went to Xibalba, defeated his killers, and brought him back to life. Classic-period artists depicted First Father being reborn through the cracked carapace of a turtle shell, often flanked by his two sons. The text on the new stela in Mayer's book told us that the main event of Creation was the appearance of this turtle shell. On Stela C, however, the Quirigua scribes evoked a much more cornmonly used Creation image-that of "three stone settings" (Fig. 2:5). They named each stone, and told us who set them and where they were set, as follows:

The Jaguar Paddler and the Stingray Paddler seated a stone
It happened at Na-Ho-Chan, the Jaguar throne-stone.
The Black House-Red-God seated a stone
It happened at the Earth Partition, the Snake-throne-stone.
Itzamna set the stone at the Waterlily-throne-stone.

The setting of the first of these three stones of Creation is shown on an extraordinary pot (Fig. 2:6). The scene on this pot depicts six gods seated in front of a wizened personage whom scholars have dubbed God L-one of the principal denizens of the Otherworld. Large bundles, two marked with a Nine-Star-Over-Earth glyph, rest on the floor in front of them. The aged God L, complete with his cigarette and Muwan Bird headdress, sits inside a house made of mountain-monsters with a crocodile on its roof. Behind him is a bundle called ikatz, "burden,"¹⁰ representing the weightiness of his office. He sits on the jaguar-covered throne mentioned in the Quirigua account of Creation.

The text that accompanies the imagery on this remarkable vase begins with the Calendar Round date 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk'u, assuring us that we are, in fact, seeing the Creation. The verb in the first phrase reads tz'akah; which means "to bring into existence" and "to put in order."¹¹ The place "brought into existence" is called ek' u tan¹² "black [is] its center." Remember that in these first moments of the Creation the sky is still "lying down" on the face of the earth, so that there is no light. The black background of this vase is meant to express that darkness. In this case, the things being put in order are the seven gods themselves, all described as ch'u, "god" or "holy being." They are organized in the heavens in the following sequence: first God Sky, then God Earth, God Nine-Footsteps, God Three-Born-Together, God Ha-te-chi, and the Jaguar-Paddler, who is named as one of the stone-setters on Stela C at Quirigua. The name of a seventh god¹³ didn't fit at the bottom of the list and was put in the corner in front of the upper row of gods. In the Classic texts, as well as in the Popol Vuh, Creation is not the work of a solitary being, but a great effort brought about by many beings who plan, discuss, and act together. This philosophy is still an important part of Maya community life. The special work of the shaman in contemporary Maya ritual is always done within the framework of a supporting and witnessing group.

On the other side of the Maya world from Quirigua, scribes at the royal capital of Palenque carved their own version of Creation on the Tablet of the Cross. This inscription, along with the inscriptions in the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun, are among the most important surviving Classic-period texts. Not only do these texts provide vital details of the Creation story that were not recorded in the public records of other kingdoms, but they also parallel the Popol Vuh in its incorporation of the Creation story into the political charter of a Maya state.

**** On the Tablet of the Cross, the Palenque account begins with the birth of First Mother six years before the Creation on 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ahaw 18 Tz'ek (December 7, 3121 B.C.) and five hundred and forty days earlier, the birth of First Father, Hun-Nal-Ye, on 12.19.11.13.0 1 Ahaw 8 Muwan (June 16, 3122 B.C.). His birth (Fig. 2:7a) is connected to the Creation day, 4,khaw 8 Kumk'u (August 13, 3114 B.C.), when, according to the inscrip- tion, thirteen cycles ended. The text mentions an action that First Father accomplished on Creation day, but we haven't been able to decipher what 14 it was. However, in the next clause, the Palenque scribes repeated Creation again and described it as "it was made visible, the image at Lying-down- Sky, the First-Three-Stone-Place." Then we learned that five hundred and forty-two days later (1.9.2 in the Maya system), Hun-Nal-Ye "entered or became the sky" (och ta chan). This "entering" event occurred on February 5, 3112 B.C. (Fig. 2:7b). The action of "entering the sky" is recorded on another extraordinary painted pot (Fig. 2:7c). This pot depicts one of the Hero Twins (One- Ahaw in the Classic texts and One-Hunahpu in the K'iche' Popol Vuh) 1 and a great bird who is trying to land in a huge ceiba tree" heavy w'th fruit. This mythical bird is Itzam-Yeh, Classic prototype of Wuqub- Kaqix, "Seven-Macaw,"" of Popol Vuh fame. In that story, in the time before the sky was lifted up to make room for the light, the vainglorious Seven-Macaw imagined himself to be the sun. Offended by his pride, the Hero Twins humbled him by breaking his beautiful shining tooth with a pellet from their blowgun (Fig. 2:7d). This pot shows One-Ahaw aiming at the bird as he swoops down to land in his tree. As Itzam-Yeh lands on his perch, the text tells us he is "entering or becoming the sky." This particular "sky-entering" is not the one mentioned in the Pa- lenque text. It is the final event that occurred in the previous creation before the universe was remade. Before the sky could be raised and the real sun revealed in all its splendor, the Hero Twins had to put the false sun, Itzam-Yeh, in his place. If the date on this pot corresponds to that pre-Creation event, as we believe it does, then Itzam-Yeh was defeated on 12.18.4.5.0 1 Ahaw 3 K'ank'ln (May 28, 3149 B.C.). After the new universe was finally brought into existence, First Father also entered the sky by landing in the tree, just as Itzam-Yeh did." This is a strange image to associate with a human being, but we will soon see how the Maya imagined such an event. When the Palenque scribes of the Tablet of the Cross continued the inscription, they used one of the most common and important Mayan literary conventions a couplet repeating the information from the preceding passage in complementary form. The first passage told us how First Father entered the sky five hundred and forty-two days (1.9.2), after the "image appeared at Lying-down-Sky, First-Three-Stone-Place." The second version of this event told us the formal name of the day@13 Ik', the lying-down of Mol (Fig. 2:8a)-and a second version of what hap- pened. This time around, First Father's entering into the sky was por- trayed in the poetic metaphor of a house dedication." The second passage reads hoy wakah chanal waxakna-tzuk u ch'ul kaba it 1 yototxamar4" was made proper, the Ra'sed-up-Sky-Place, the Eight- House-Partitions, [is] its holy name, the house of the north." In this way we learn that First Father's "enterinl, the sky' also created a house in the north and that it was made of eight partitions. The name of that house, "Raised-up-Sky," is the reciprocal opposite of the "Lying-down-Sky" of the 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk'u place. "Raised-up-Sky" (Wakah-Chan") is also the name of the World Tree at the center of the panel in the Temple of the Cross (Fig. 2:8b). Moreover, the image of this primordial tree" rises out of the original offering plate of sacrifice. Thus we know that the Maya thought of the entire north direction as a house erected at Creation with the World Tree, the Wakah-Chan, penetrating its central axis. First Father "entered the sky" by raising this tree out of a plate of sacrifice. We believe that the eight partitions of First Father's cosmic house correspond to the eight divisions in a diagram of the cosmos from the Madrid Codex (Fig. 2:8c) and to the dire 1 ct ons recorded on the walls of  a tomb at Rio Azul, an Early Classic capital in northeastern Peten (Fig. 2:8d). The glyph phrases denoting the cardinal directions of east, north, west, and south are written on the proper directional walls of the tomb. But the four intercardinal direction phrases are written in the room's corners." At least one of these inscriptions refers to the Wak-Nabna4 "Raised-up-Ocean-Place," and another reads "Crocodile-Sky." Taken together, these phrases comprise the eight directional partitions of the world that were established when the World Tree of the Center was erected. The center tree, the Raised-up-Sky tree, itself often has the head form of the glyph tzuk "partition," inscribed on its trunk to mark it as yet another world partition." First Father's house thus orders the entire upper cosmos, the world of humanity, of plants and animals, and of the sky beings, by establishing the center, the periphery, and the partitions of the world. Even today the Maya practice this partitioning and ordering of the world in their rituals." The Maya conceived of the roof of this house of eight partitions as the dome of heaven, but they also specifically called it yotot xamar; "house of the north." For the Classic Maya, the central axis of the cosmos did not run from the zenith of the sky to its nadir-that is, from the point in the sky directly over our heads to the point exactly under our feet." Instead, it penetrated the heavens at the north celestial pole," which today lies near Polaris, the North Star. In the tropics, the North Star and the pivot it marks lie much lower in the sky and closer to the horizon, so that the rotation of the stars across the night sky resembles the interior view of@ a barrel turning on its long axis. Furthermore, the name of the Palenque Creation house allows us to unravel the identity of the mysterious Wak-Chan-,4haw, "Six-(or Raised- up)-Sky-Lord," of the Stela C account at Quirigua. Palenque leaves no doubt who he was. Hun-Nal-Ye, First Father, was the being who "raised up the sky" and "Raised-up-Sky-Lord" was the person who according to Stela C, also caused the three stones to be planted when the sky was still "lying down."" That he was also the Maize God is confirmed on a offering vessel from Tikal, MT 140 (Fig. 2:9), that names the Maize God as the Wak-Chan-Winik the "Raised-up-Sky-Person." On the Tablet of the Cross at Palenque we found yet a third repetition of the events of Creation. In this passage the scribes wrote pethi Wak- Chan-k " "turned, the Raised-up-Sky-Heart" (Fig. 2: 1 0). The ki phonetic 4 sign has two references here. One is to an object, that is, a "heart," that Itzam-Yeh often grips in his beak, and the other is to the heart of heaven. Today, that heart of heaven would be the North Star, Polaris, but in Maya times, the north pivot of the sky fell in a dark area. This black void was the heart of heaven. The "turning" motion described is the movement of the constellations around it. The standing up of the axis mundi not only lifted the sky from its lying-dovrn position on the earth but it imparted motion to the star fields. This motion was the beginning of time and space, for it is through the movement of the stars, the Milky Way, and the planets that we human beings calculate the passage of time. This, then, was the Creation story as far as we knew about it. Under the aegis of First Father, One-Malze-Revealed, three stones were set up at a place called "Lying-dovrn-Sky," forming the image of the sky. First Father had entered tfie sky and made a house of eight partitions there. He had also raised the Wakah-Chan, the World Tree, so that its crown stood in the north sky. And finally, he had given circular motion to the sky, setting the constellations into their dance through the night. This is where we were when the depths of meaning hidden in these events suddenly began to reveal themselves to us. Since most of it unfolded in Xustin, we'll tell the story through Linda's words. LINDA'S ENCOLINTER WITH CREATION The key to the unfolding of Creation was given to David Freldel in a hotel lobby in Chicago during the American Anthropological Meetings in November 1991. After the sessions that David had organized were over for the morning, he stood for a while talking to Bruce Love, an epigrapher from the University of California at Riverside. Bruce just happened to zodiacal constel- mention in passing that a scorpion appeared among the 1 lotions represented in the Paris Codex, one of the four Maya books surviving from Precolumbian times. David immediately remembered that the blowgunner pot shows a akah-Chan tree. Maybe, he thought, this scorpion at the base of the W scorpion represented the same constellation as the one in the Paris Codex. When he tried out his idea on me, I resisted it, stubbornly and vociferously. During regular phone conversations we conducted in v"it- ing this book, we had been arguing about the nature of north and south r7@ in Classic Maya thought. David argued for the widely held view that north was conceived of as "up" and associated with the zenith, while  south was "down" and linked to the nadir." I argued for their being associated with horizontal directions. If the head of the World Tree pierced the north pivot of the sky, he asked, couldn't the scorpion be opposite it in the south? Yes, I replied, as I remembered the image of Scorpius poised over the mountains south of the Group of the Cross at Palenque." His 'Idea grew on me through the next month, enough that I presented it at a small conference we attended in San Juan, Puerto Rico," in January 1992. There I revised my former position and said that the ancient Maya conception of the sky was a tunnell stretching from the north polar axis to the Scorpion in the south. When I returned to Austin shortly thereaf- ter, I had to put the finishing touches on a paper on Maya cosmology I had written for my friend Nikolai GrLibe for an exhibition he was curating in Germany." As I worked, words from another friend who had been at the San Juan conference, Johannes Wilbert, the great ethnogra- pher of the Warao of Venezuela, came back to me. He had admonished me always to look to nature for the source of mythological symbolism. At the last minute, I decided to follow his advice and look at a map of the sky. I wanted to find out what it looked like when Scorpius was opposite the North Star. I rummaged through my bookshelves and found a book of star maps, Menzel's Stars and Planets. Unfortunately, this book printed the south and north views of the sky on two separate pages, so I had to find some tracing paper and place it over the page showing the north sky. I drew it and then shifted the tracing paper to the south page and joined both 'des of the skv to-aether. I drew in Scorpius and the North Star and then si looked at the result. My heart jumped into my mouth. There it was. The Milky Way (Fig. 2:1 1) stretched south to north from Scorpius past the North Star. The Wakah-Chan was the Milky Way. When I presented this new insight at my next seminar, one of my graduate students, Matthew Looper, contributed yet another critical idea to the growing pattern. While I was telling the class about the Wakah- Chan World Tree being the Milky Way, I heard him murmur from the back of the crowded seminar room, "That's why he entered the road." His words exploded like a lightning bolt in my mind. The great image of Pakal's sarcophagus at Palenque (Fig. 2:12) shows him at the moment of his death falling down the World Tree into the Maw of the Earth. The expression the ancient Maya used for this fall was och bi4" "he entered the road." The road was the Milky Way, which is called both the Sak Be ("White Road") and Xibal Be, "Road of Awe," by the Maya. Pakal enters this road in death. I went home that night a little awed by the discoveries and called David to infect him with my excitement. He immediately locked on to the idea, but countered that John Sosa, a brilliant young ethnographer who had been working with Yukatek Maya on their cosmology, had concluded that the ecliptic was symbolized by a double-headed animal. According to Sosa, this was none other than the sun-plate-skull icon we call the Quadripartite Monster joined by a snake body to the same head on the other horizon. I didn't believe that the Quadripartite God was the ecliptic, but the idea of a double-headed snake symbol began to make sense in terms of what I knew about the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the line of constellations in which the sun rises and sets throughout the year. We divide this band into twelve zones that gives us our zodiacal birth signs. At night, these ecliptic constellations create a path across the sky which marks the track of the sun in its daily and yearly movement. The planets and moon also follow this path, which snakes from north to south and back again as the year proceeds. In the tropics, the ecliptic actually crosses directly overhead and occupies the zenith position of the sky. I thought about the image of the World Tree and realized that the Double-headed Serpent (Fig. 2:13) that was draped around and through its branches had to be the ecliptic." Later I realized this new identifica- tion also explained the dedication pot from Tikal that had allowed us to identify the Maize God as the main actor in Creation (Fig. 2:9). In the scene, he sits at the place of Creation holding the ecliptic snake in his arms with the Stingray Paddler emerging from one mouth and the Jaguar Paddler from the other. This little pot actually shows the moment of creation when First Father stretches out the path of the sun and the Planets across the sky. The next day Matt came by my house and told me about two more observations he had found in the work of Dennis and Barbara Tedlock." They had discovered that Seven-Macaw of the Popol Vuh was the Big Dipper in the north sky, and that his wife, Chimalmat, was the Chimal Ek' or the Little Dipper." I found that information interesting, but not really mind-blowing. But Matt wasn't finished yet. "Did you know that Dennis Tedlock identified Orion as the three stones of the hearth?" he asked innocently. "No," I answered. "Where'd he say that?" And we rushed into my library to find Tedlock's Popol Vuh. There it was: "Today [Alnitak, Saiph, and R'gel in Orion] are said to be the three hearthstones of the typical Quich6 kitchen fireplace, arranged to form a triangle, and the cloudy area they enclose (Great Nebula M42) is said to be the smoke from the fire" (Tedlock 1985:26 1 ).37 1 was stunned. These had to be the same three stones that were laid at Creation when the sea was still lying down on the face of the earth. The first act of the gods was to create the hearth at the center of the universe where the first fire of Creation could be started (Fig. 2:14). In fact, John Carlson later pointed out to us that the Aztec's name for the belt of Orion was their word for the fire drill that created new fires." I realized that since the sky was still lying down upon the earth on 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk'u, the act of seating the stones in the triangular pattern of the hearth created an image on the face of the earth and in the sky at the same time. The two were, after all, then 'oined together. The next bombshell came from another of my students two days later. Khristaan Villela had come over that afternoon to file away some of the stacks of papers that decorate my every table. After he was done, he asked, "What about the Bonampak' murals?" Oh dear, I thought to myself, are they going to fit into this pattern also? My friends Mary Miller and Floyd Lounsbury" had proposed many years earlier that the cartouches over the 'udgment scene in the middle room at Bonampak' represented constellations that were seen at dawn on the day of the battle. At Khris's urging, I checked out the sky on that day, August 6, A.D. 792, with EZCosmos, the computer program I use for astronomy. Again I was stunned by the results. In the hours before dawn (Fig. 2:15), the constellations of Gemini and Orion had hovered above the eastern horizon with Saturn and Mars above and between them. The cartouches of Bonampak' show copulating peccaries in the cartouche at the left, a turtle with three stars on the right, and between them two anthropomorphic figures throwing star signs into the scene. Lounsbury had already published evidence that some sources called Gemini the ttturtle star," while others identified the turtle with Orion. As I looked at the computer screen, everything clicked. Gemini had to be the copulating peccaries and Orion the turtle. The three stars on its back in the cartouche at Bonampak' were placed in the exact pattern of Orion's belt. But more important, the Maize God was reborn from the cracked carapace of a turtle, and we had a text that said that the first image of the turtle was seen at Creation (Fig. 2:4). The two an- thropomorphic figures between the peccaries and the turtle had to be the 'fications of Saturn and Mars. And we already knew many exam- personi ples of other planets, such as Venus and Jupiter, that were represented by anthropomorphic figures. We seemed to have two more here. Not until much later did it hit me that August 6, the date of the zenith passage at Bonampak', was only seven days before the Creation day of August 13. Matt Looper provided the confirmation by calling my attention to a picture from the Madrid Codex, another of the four Maya books. It shows a turtle (Fig. 2:16) with a triangle of stones on its back. The turtle in the codex is shown suspended from cords tying it to the skyband because Orion hangs below the ecliptic. Clearly Orion was the turtle from which the Maize God rose in his resurrection (Fig. 2:17). The Milky Way rearing above the turtle had to be the Maize God appearing in his tree form as he does on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross at Palenque. The image of the first turtle really is in the sky. The identification of Gemini as copulating peccaries made sense in another curious way. For years we have seen pots that have these odd modeled peccary heads as their feet. All of these pots have the sea painted or drawn on their bottoms and an extraordinary one in the Dallas Mu- seum of Art shows the sun god paddling a canoe across this sea (Fig. 2:18). 1 realized that this must be the sun riding the ecliptic across the Peccaries of Gemini. I ran into a bit of trouble at this point because there was a lot of counter evidence that identified Gemini as a turtle. The Yukatek Maya of Chan K'om" call Gemini -4k Ek, "turtle," and they say that the three stars in the middle of his back are the choc& "intestines," of the turtle. Fortunately, I found the solution to this paradox close at hand. Floyd Lounsbury had pointed out that ak is the word for both "turtle" and peccary." Thus, ak ek'can be either "turtle star" or "peccary star," and you don't know which unless you ask. Furthermore, when I saw the pot again in April, I realized the peccary heads have a trifoil sign in their eyes that specifically identifies them as the ak peccary." Justin Kerr, another friend, gave me some incredible evidence that showed that the Maya thought of the constellations in both ways. I already had pictures showing Orion as a turtle, and Gemini appears as the peccaries at Bonampak', and in the Paris Codex zodiac as a turtle. When I was at Justin's house in late February 1992, he used the enormous database of pottery images he has created to find images of peccaries. One of these images occurred on a shell published twenty years ago in Mike Cue's Tke-.L@ffw ae bo F@.@ &- J@Fk b& -& -to 1:& rnagic stir again. Here was a peccary with a Waterlily Monster (Fig. 2:19a) attached to its haunches just like the one attached to the Maize God's turtle shell (Fig. 2:4). It was split open 'ust like the turtle shell and out of the cleft rose the Maize God carrying a brush and paint pot in his hand so that he could paint the images on the sky. Here was a cleft peccary directly substituting for the cleft turtle. They had to mean the same thing. Justin then called my attention to yet another pot from Maya Scribe